28. this life is . . .

Steven Leckie, Freddy Pompeii / photo by Ross Taylor

Don Pyle: I remember there was a New Year’s Eve show at David’s. The Cardboard Brains played, the Ugly played, the Sofisticatos played.

It just felt like chaos.

Sam Ferrara: There was a buffet, and people started throwing baloney at us. So Mike grabs a piece of baloney, folds it in half, bites it, and puts it around his dick. Raymi starts peeing on the crowd, and Anna Bourque, the bass player from the Curse, went down on me. This all happened while we were playing a song.

Raymi Mulroney: My brother would get onstage wearing a voodoo mask singing, the cameras going off, and there was three hundred people there stoned out of their minds. Booze, prizes, five bucks admission, three bands, everybody decked in leathers. It was nuts, it was a fantastic time, and it just got carried away.

Sam was playing bass, I think Tony was on drums, and Freddy Pompeii was singing.

A girl got pulled onstage, her clothes ripped off. I think I went down on her; I might have, I’m not sure. My girlfriend saw it and flipped out and took off on me. It was real raw stuff. It was nuts. The place got torn apart basically.

Don Pyle: I remember the Cramps were also playing at the New Yorker right around the corner. I went to the one show at David’s and then went over to see the Cramps, and minutes after I left the place caught on fire and burned to the ground.

Raymi Mulroney: I think by four o’clock it was emptied out and by six o’clock it burnt down. That’s what I heard.

Nora Currie: The Curse were supposed to play David’s that night and it was cancelled at the last minute. I was with Mickey and she was so upset. We dropped acid and we were roaming the city, cursing David’s. We were going around saying, “We’re going to fucking burn it down.”

In the morning we heard it burned down, so we were waiting for the cops to come knocking on our door. Ha ha ha.

Tony Vincent: That night I stayed over with Cynthia from the B-Girls. Sunday morning someone called and said, “David’s burned down, all the equipment’s burned.” I thought it had to be a joke at first, but it wasn’t. So I ran down there that morning.

The fire was so hot that everything just melted. All the equipment, everything. There was nothing left. I think somebody sabotaged it. I don’t know why.

We stopped playing; we just stopped playing. So did the Viletones and a lot of the other bands. I don’t think it had anything to do with equipment, it was just the whole thing had burnt us out. It was like, “This is the end.” That’s what it felt like.

Johnny Garbagecan: I heard about the fire at nine o’clock in the morning and I was there at nine-thirty. I jumped out of bed – you’ve never seen anybody out of bed so fast on New Year’s morning. So I got there and they were trying to figure out, How did this fire start?

Chris Haight: It was just some rickety old joint, wood, so when they put a match on that one it just – shooop – like a Roman candle. I don’t know much about the demise of him [Sandy Leblanc] or the joint, but I think it was pretty heavy. He was tied into some heavy shit.

Freddy Pompeii: The next day we were over there salvaging whatever we could, our amplifiers and drums and everything. Some roadies were dragging stuff out of this burned-out hole and up pulls this van and it’s the Misfits. We said, “What are you lookin’ for, man?” They said, “We’re lookin’ for David’s, we have a gig there.” And we said, “Well, I don’t think you have a gig anymore.”

Glen Danzig was a real skinny guy at the time with his hair dyed green in streaks and stuff, and they all just stood there completely disillusioned. I felt so bad for them.

There was another room just starting to open up called Shock Theatre. It was run by some friends of mine, we called him Count Bill, and his wife. He sort of looked like a vampire. The Shock Theatre was an old movie theatre right outside of Little Italy around College Street. They started having punk rock shows there. While the Misfits were in town they put them up there because they had living quarters, and they let them do their show there so they were able to make a few bucks so they could get home.

Steven Leckie: Funnily enough, we were the only band who had actual insurance, ha ha ha, so Motor comes out with this drum kit the Stones couldn’t afford. It was gorgeous.

Tibor Takacs: The fire didn’t help anything. It kind of put a damper on things for a little while. All the equipment got burned and there was no more club. It was the venue, really. I can’t remember, by that point were there other places that were playing? No, that was it.

That was just another chink in the Viletones’ coffin. It was too hard to keep it going, and it was too hard to make it into a business venture which our partner was pushing for. Understand we were using his money and we just barely broke even, you know? It was too risky.

The Viletones were not moving on or evolving as much as I wanted them to. They were just doing the same thing they always did. They wouldn’t rehearse very much and new songs weren’t forthcoming. It was just like they were happy to be drinking beer and playing wherever.

Steven Leckie: The next day, of course, everyone calls me like, “Steve, you won’t believe what happened.” I was down there at seven or eight in the morning. For me that’s really early.

It evokes a sense of possible mystery …

Freddy Pompeii: Nobody knows why David’s burned down.

Steven Leckie: Losing David’s held us back, but I always thought that pain was the ticket that you bought to the Viletones. Teenage Head could play the El Mocambo. I knew we couldn’t.

But I loved that place. It was so wickedly cool, like Studio 54. People were doing blow on the table – “You mean you could just do it front of everyone?” “Yeah, go ahead.” That’s the way it was in the ’70s. And I was very young but I was going, “Wow, this life is going to be good.” And David’s gave you that feeling, too. You could do amyl nitrate and drink like banshees for free.

Freddy Pompeii: I think I’d like to go back to the days when we had David’s, except know more of what I know now than what I knew then.

That one period; it was maybe a six- or nine-month period of Viletones history. We didn’t know how big it was until we started getting press from England and France and press from the United States. When we played CBGB’s we were written up in Variety the first time we played. To get written up in Variety and you’re nobody is a pretty big step, but it really didn’t seem that way to us because I guess we were in the middle of it. It impressed other people, but we were the least impressed. If I could do it again I think maybe I would have worked harder. That’s my only regret; I just didn’t work hard enough. None of us really worked hard enough. We were just basically coasting; getting through it.

If I was aware of what was really happening on the outside I think I could relive those years even better, fuller.

The time of David’s was when we had the most opportunities to choose from.